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5.0 out of 5 stars
Little known book by Defoe,
By
This review is from: Roxana (Paperback)
I love this book. It was as good as "Moll Flanders" and has a very happy and satisfying ending.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A woman's place?,
By
This review is from: Penguin Classics Roxana (Paperback)
Told in the first person, this is the tragic story of the life of the social climbing Roxana - it reads (as I suppose it was intended to read) as a guilt-ridden confession. Abandoned (with her five children) by her profligate and irresponsible husband, Roxana rises to wealth by a series of affairs with well-connected men. Not to give away the ending, but the achievement of wealth does not result in anything like happiness. Due to the way she was treated, Roxana has a highly critical view of marriage, and advocates equal rights for women. Although he puts such opinions in Roxana's mouth, Defoe makes it clear that (for the time) these were extreme views - Roxana goes too far in her cynicism and amorality. I thought that Defoe's point was that women should be treated far more humanely than they were, but not that they should be treated as equals. Defoe also explores interesting issues surrounding the moral effects of both extreme poverty and great wealth: "... for tho' Poverty and Want is an irresistible Temptation to the Poor, Vanity and Great Things are as irresistible to others..." In the edition I was reading, the editor had done his best to maintain Defoe's original spelling and style. You have therefore to put up with the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Defoe's grammar and spelling. Either you're into this or you're not, but I prefered it that way. The lack of chapters or other breaks in the text was a bother: I don't know enough about the literature of Defoe's time to judge whether that was normal, or whether Defoe deliberately avoided the use of such "artificial" stylistic devices in order to maintain the feeling that this was someone giving her confession. Unless you're able to sit down and read the novel at one sitting (I wasn't) it means that you have to judge carefully when to create your own breaks. Although "Roxana" had plenty of points of interest, I felt that it was over-long. Defoe had made his case long before the end, and although the ending is shocking and tragic, the pathway there could have been shorter.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Defoe fan,
By Stephen Ward (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Roxana (Paperback)
I read "Robinson Crusoe" as a young boy, and never forgot it (55 years later); then, as a mature adult I read "A Journal of the Plague Year" and "Moll Flanders", both of which were execellent reads; and a few days ago I finished "Roxana", so let me share a few thoughts about the book.First off, when you read Defoe, it is essential to realize that you are dipping into the very beginnings of English literature. Anything that is three centuries removed from the present has to be put into its historical context in order to make sense of it, and contemporary values must be held in abeyance. If you are capable of doing that, you are in for a heck of a good story, as are all of the books mentioned above. "Roxana" concerns the rise and fall (mostly rise) of a woman left destitute, along with her five children, by her fool of a husband. Circumstances eventually lead her to prostitution as a means of survival, and as luck would have it, her "gentlemen protectors" are uniformly wealthy, and by means of careful marshalling of her earnings Roxana becomes independently wealthy. But what she lacks is social status, which leads her to her final alliance with a Dutch merchant who knows nothing of her past. Along the way, Roxana begets and abandons about nine offspring here and there(this being the days before birth control), and one of them, Susan, figures in the downfall of Roxana. This novel pays great attention to the psychological aspects of living a life that is generally condemned by society. Defoe shapes Roxana's psychological health around his own ethical views, and, as such, makes Roxana suffer for her choices in the long run. Thus, the novel does not end happily for its central character, an interesting fact, in that this is the only novel of Defoe's that does not end happily for the protagonist. All told, "Roxana" is a great read. Defoe certainly reflects his ethical biases, but at the same time does a good job of objectively fleshing out charaters who forcefully express points of view that differ from his own. For me, everything worked beautifully in the novel until the last paragraph, but that happens a lot in literature.
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